Uzlah, and the strangers

Two ideas get borrowed to make withdrawal look like devotion, and they are worth handling directly.

Uzlah, deliberate withdrawal, is a real category and scholars have written about it carefully. Al-Ghazali opens his treatment of it by saying that people differ a great deal about seclusion and mixing and about preferring one to the other, and that neither of the two is free of drawbacks that push a person away from it and benefits that call a person to it: أما بعد فإن للناس اختلافا كثيرا في العزلة والمخالطة وتفضيل إحداهما على الأخرى ومع أن كل واحدة منهما لا تنفك عن غوائل تنفر عنها وفوائد تدعو إلى إليها. The English there is ours, a rendering rather than a stored translation. He then names eight authorities who held for seclusion, among them Sufyan ath-Thawri, Ibrahim ibn Adham, Fudayl ibn Iyad and Bishr al-Hafi, and elsewhere in the same work he records that a group of the early Muslims urged companionship and affection and disliked being alone. He does not settle it and neither will we.

What is worth being honest with yourself about is which one you are doing. In those discussions uzlah is limited, purposeful and chosen. It is not a word for having nobody. If you reached for it after being hurt rather than before, that is worth knowing about yourself, and it is not a thing to be ashamed of.

The other is the narration about the religion beginning as something strange and returning to being strange, with glad tidings to the strangers. Its reference is settled: it is in our corpus at four places and graded sound. We are not building anything on it here, and the reason is what it is about rather than any doubt about whether it was said. The reading is about the condition of the religion, not an instruction about your social life. And one of the wordings glosses the strangers as those who left their families and tribes, which in the hands of somebody looking for permission to stay withdrawn does the opposite of what this lesson is for.